Page - 994 - in The Complete Aristotle

inside the head, and the habitat of these creatures is in the hollow underneath the root of the tongue and in the neighbourhood of the vertebra to which the head is attached. These creatures are as large as the largest grubs; they grow all together in a cluster, and they are usually about twenty in number. Deer then, as has been observed, are without a gall-bladder; their gut, however, is so bitter that even hounds refuse to eat it unless the animal is exceptionally fat. With the elephant also the liver is unfurnished with a gall- bladder, but when the animal is cut in the region where the organ is found in animals furnished with it, there oozes out a fluid resembling gall, in greater or less quantities. Of animals that take in sea-water and are furnished with a lung, the dolphin is unprovided with a gall-bladder. Birds and fishes all have the organ, as also oviparous quadrupeds, all to a greater or a lesser extent. But of fishes some have the organ close to the liver, as the dogfishes, the sheat- fish, the rhine or angel-fish, the smooth skate, the torpedo, and, of the lanky fishes, the eel, the pipe-fish, and the hammer-headed shark. The callionymus, also, has the gall-bladder close to the liver, and in no other fish does the organ attain so great a relative size. Other fishes have the organ close to the gut, attached to the liver by certain extremely fine ducts. The bonito has the gall- bladder stretched alongside the gut and equalling it in length, and often a double fold of it. others have the organ in the region of the gut; in some cases far off, in others near; as the fishing-frog, the elops, the synagris, the muraena, and the sword-fish. Often animals of the same species show this diversity of position; as, for instance, some congers are found with the organ attached close to the liver, and others with it detached from and below it. The case is much the same with birds: that is, some have the gall-bladder close to the stomach, and others close to the gut, as the pigeon, the raven, the quail, the swallow, and the sparrow; some have it near at once to the liver and to the stomach as the aegocephalus; others have it near at once to the liver and the gut, as the falcon and the kite. < div id=“section33” class=“section” title=“16”> 16 Again, all viviparous quadrupeds are furnished with kidneys and a bladder. Of the ovipara that are not quadrupedal there is no instance known of an animal, whether fish or bird, provided with these organs. Of the ovipara that are quadrupedal, the turtle alone is provided with these organs of a magnitude to correspond with the other organs of the animal. In the turtle the kidney resembles the same organ in the ox; that is to say, it looks one single organ 994